How the safety record for SpaceX and Blue Origin compare

Since Elon Musk co-founded SpaceX in 2002, many industry experts have been drawn to his free-spirited entrepreneurship. SpaceX has made significant advancements since its launch. The company was the first private one to launch people into space. Its Starlink division is the biggest satellite operator in the globe. With their reusable rockets and reduced launch costs, SpaceX has outperformed rivals like Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.

But that’s not to say Blue Origin is a failure. Blue Origin has accomplished important milestones since its early days in 2000. The creation of reusable rockets, successful vertical landings, and collaborations with Nasa for lunar exploration are a few of its noteworthy achievements.

While we are witnessing all the fantastic results both companies are producing, we don’t usually hear about the things that go on behind the scenes. What is the safety record looking like for both these space companies?. According to eight former SpaceX employees, a string of safety lapses in January 2022 led to one serious injury, highlighting systemic issues at SpaceX.

Employee Francisco Cabada suffered a fractured skull and was placed in a coma after a part fell off during pressure testing of a Raptor V2 rocket engine. Senior officials at the Hawthorne, California site were regularly cautioned about the risks of expediting the engine's development, as well as the need for sufficient staff training and component testing, the individuals told Reuters.

According to two employees, the part that malfunctioned and hit the worker had a defect that was found but left unfixed prior to testing. The Cabada family reached out to the company to find out why he wasn’t protected, but Cabada’s wife Ydy said she got no response. She told Reuters at the time: “It would have been nice to get a call from Elon Musk. But I guess workers are just disposable to them.”.

The investigation also highlights that while the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has required companies to report their total number of injuries every year since 2016, SpaceX failed to do so for most of those years. Despite this, Reuters was able to uncover at least 600 injuries by looking through court documents in worker lawsuits, employee medical records, state workers’ compensation claims as well as emergency-call records.

More than a dozen current and former employees claimed that SpaceX frequently neglected to adequately train or equip new hires and occasionally hurried to hire staff. For example, they claimed that inexperienced workers were given welding equipment without any instruction.

Four of these workers, who had just graduated from college, talked about having to make difficult decisions about the safety of risky activities with no direction. OSHA inspection documents show that in November 2021, two technicians from Brownsville were using a crane equipped with a lifting magnet to move 500-pound square steel tubing. OSHA determined that because the crane was only built to lift 300 pounds, the tube fell and crushed a worker's hand.

According to the agency's inspection report sent to Reuters, the worker, whose identity was redacted, needed long-term care following surgery, which included having part of their ring finger amputated. The company was criticised by the agency for not ensuring that workers tested the crane's capacity to hoist the load. After agreeing to address the worker-safety issues noted in the report, SpaceX appealed the $43,506 punishment and had it reduced to $8,701.

Compared to SpaceX, Blue Origin has had fewer reported accidents. However, 21 current and former Blue Origin employees publicly accused the company in 2021 of having a toxic workplace culture, citing things like unsafe practices, a lack of tolerance for dissent, and sexism.

Fearing professional retaliation, all but one signatory, Alexandra Abrams, chose not to be publicly identified. She worked for the company for two and a half years and briefly worked in public relations before founding the employee communications department before being let go in 2019.

Bob Smith, the CEO of Blue Origin, who took control of the business in 2017, is said to have established an “inner circle” of dependable top executives who frequently make “unilateral decisions, often without the buy-in of engineers, other experts, or senior leaders across various departments,” according to the essay.

The authors of the essay also condemn Blue Origin's alleged sexist practices, detailing a work environment where women's opinions are frequently disregarded and some male executives are reportedly known to treat female staff members with disrespect. The essay also adds a senior executive who was also a part of Mr Smith's purported inner circle was the target of “multiple” HR complaints because of his “consistently inappropriate [behaviour] with women”.